How (Un)Lucky that Military Abuse in Iraq has always been photographed and published

Great Debates
41

I stated:

“I accept that this is part of the natural outcome of military training and one should not be surprised when it happens.”

You stated:

“This is not the natural outcome of military training.”

Below I will try to produce some Social Science support for my contention that one of the undesired outcomes of miltary training and experience (among other experiences such as Prison Officers, Mental Health Nurses, Police, Care Home Staff) is one of Brutalization, Learned dehumanization practices, strong belief in the rightness of one’s group’s actions in the face of contradictory evidence etc…

Perhaps you would provide me some cites for your contention that military training does not lead to the increased likelihood of unacceptable benaviour.

Exercizing Authority

Zimbardo suggests that putting people in the role of power over the weak automatically leads to poor outcomes if it is seen as acceptable to treat the weak group as ‘other’.

http://web.isp.cz/jcrane/IB/Obedience_to_authority.pdf

The importance of this is that juniors will follow not only intended orders, but also deficient orders issued by people well down the food chain.

Group Authority

Festinger suggests that group authority is important and overrules individual morality.

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/dissonance.htm

Dehumanization and Demonization

Aho suggests that dehumanization demonization will lead to unintended negative acts and may result in death.

http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/scapegoating-01.html

All of the above (together with associated research) shows that given an authoritarian structure, people become automatic rule followers, even obeying orders that are illegitimate and against theri own principles and may easily lead to individuals or groups who are seen as ‘other’ to be demonized and dehumanized, and often tortured and killed.

For a military to be efficient it is necessary to have chains of commands, people open to the exercise of authority, people willing to act against their own particular wishes and beliefs and people willing to take extreme action against the enemy.

Basic social psychology would predict a generalization of this from intended key areas to other unintended areas.

It would take enormous effort to ensure that this genralization did not take place. I don’t believe that the military engages sufficiently in such counter action to avoid these unintended consequences.

An example of this can be found in the recent video of beatings by British soldiers. The adolescents had recently been seen as ‘other’ in that they had been demonstrating against the troups and were foreign (wrong religion, wrong skin color, wrong beliefs). The beatings were organized by a junior NCO with Privates following orders. The British Army had a history of beating young N Irish Catholics as revenge. Before that similar things had happenned in Kenya, Malaya etc… During training ‘beastings’ of other soldiers who were seen as ‘other’ was part of the barrack room culture.

As an aside I grew up in a Navy town and was aware how much the military model transferred to the home life of navy brats who were my contemporaries.

I did not say that the military was the only force for exercise of authority and demonization. What most of the above have in common is an extremely authoritarian social or governmental system with a specific and dangerous demonology.

See my notes on Human nature, Social Psychology and generalization of behavior patterns above.

As you will have seen from above, I do not believe that. My argument is far more complex. I do believe that military training can be very useful for some people. But I also believe that it can have very negative effects for others.

You are right that I have never undergone military training (other than the equivalent of OTC- which certainly left me with some insights into barrack room culture). However I teach in Mental Health, Prison, Residential Home and other detention facilities (asylum) about this very subject. I do claim some expertise in the matter.

I would also point out that recent US politicking over the Geneva Convention, Treaties on Torture, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations might lead an ordinary grunt to think that what they had been taught in basic training about such concepts was now out of date. :slight_smile:

Agreed, see above. But the added impact of the making of extreme violence and killing a part of what people are expected to do has particular effects.

If you read my comments more carefully I was referring to the actions of staff, not the general atmosphere. And, yes, I do believe it is less extreme historically.

If you re read my comments, I am not saying that they are trained specifically to do this, but that it is an extremely likely undesired outcome of the miltary ethos.

I do believe that a careful reading of the social history of the military demonstrates quite clearly over more than three millennia that people trained to kill, and act in a group, and to demonize tend to act regularly towards the ‘other’ in grossly perverted ways. This is not a pop at US or UK forces, but just a note that this is a natural outcome of militarization of life.

I agree with this, but find it difficult to conceptualize a sufficiently strong course on this without leading to a fall in the efficacy of the military in the areas where it is intended to work.

Certainly in my training work I often find on long term follow up that the most attentive and interested students end up leaving the system rather than trying to change it because they see that it is so difficult to maintain the primary aims of the service while at the same time trying to avoid the virtually unavoidable negative outcomes.

Indeed that is one reason why I myself retired early from my institutional career and started teaching this very subject- I found that I could not maintain the system in a morally coherent manner, and hence decided to attempt to change it from the outside.

42

Bolding mine.
So, just to be clear what I’m getting is that you’re saying that any authoritarian and or institutional systems with strict lines of differentiation and power structures will naturally tend to be more vulnerable to these sorts of abuses. I note that you mentioned that Police, Prison, and Health Care workers as examples of this.

I’ll add to this by including the hazing problems found frequently in Fraternities and sports clubs.

If the above is your point I really don’t disagree.

That said, given that such problems are endemic of all similar systems it seems a little odd to attribute this to specifically to military training when it is in fact an inherent problem of a authoritarian system which the military attempts to counteract by military training.

Now, I would agree that the military needs to greatly improve its training and oversight in this area but saying that these problems are because of this training just seems rather unfair and only serves to obfuscate the problem.

A similar situation would be to ascribe nursing home abuse cases to “the natural outcome of health care training.” It’s arguably true in that better health care training would likely serve to prevent more of these cases but it’s misleading as it seems to suggest that health care workers train to abuse.

All in all the better point seems to be:

43

The point that you are missing is this:

In all but the military, the overt aims of the experience/training are somewhat limited- mental health- “treatment”, Residential Work- “Care”, Imprisonment- “Containment”.

The special problem with front-line military, especially marines or infantry, is that their specific and overt aim includes- “kill and maim the ‘other’”. Thus the military is a special case in that one of its overt aims may easily become a covert perverted aim of killing and maiming an inappropriate other- prisoners, adolescent rioters, civilians etc…

The perversions that occur in Mental Hosptals and Care Homes are bad enough- and this is occurring in institutions whose core values are care and treatment; Prisons are worse where the model is likely to stray from imprisonment as punishment to imprisonment for punishment. Front line military is even more likely to result in such perversions and these perversions are more likely to be severe because of available fire-power and a set of core values which defends against self-criticism, rule breaking and which allows (indeed encourages) killing as a core value.

44

Huh? What’s so special about the marines or infantry? You do realize that there are other branches of front line combat arms, right?

Nothing you’ve linked to or quoted remotely supports any of this. Indeed, the Zimbardo study you cited shows that it really doesn’t matter what the overt aims of an authoritarian structure are. Any such set-up has the potential for abuse. And what difference did available fire-power make in Abu Gharib? None of the prisoners were shot. They were beaten and tortured using stuff you could find around your own house.

Once again, your lack of knowledge about military training shows here. The military has any number of instruments for self-criticism, from After Action Reviews to monthly counselling statements, to Article 15’s.

Rule breaking? For that we have UCMJ, which includes the aforementioned Article 15’s and court martials, and abuse of prisoners is specifically forbidden in the UCMJ. Hell, how else do you explain the court martial of those soldiers? Did you think we charged them with looking ugly?

For all your talk about thorough documentation in the field of social psychology, you have yet to come up with a reliable study which specifically indicts the military as being conducive to this sort of mindset. Once again, I don’t contend that the atrocities didn’t happen. It’s just that I see them as being a consequence of war and lack of training, not of military training. If you want to show that military training leads to atrocities, you might want to do better than to give us cites about how atrocities happen in several other non-military scenarios. That doesn’t go a long way toward proving your point.

45

hear hear. i agree strongly with this last part. i’m proud of this country, although i don’t believe in using war unless it is absolutely necessary. i don’t like having my, and by extension, our name slandered with this torture scandal. that’s wrong on so many levels and completely against our core beliefs. as a “christian” nation, that’s how we dealt with slavery: by making slaves into sub-human “animals”. we, as nation speak about how people are sacred and dear to our very being. then we go out and have scandals like this. the proper thing would be to distance ourselves from it, denounce it vehemently, and offer the offenders up to an international court. we, as a nation, can find it easier to tolerate or follow along with abuse if we make the sbject of said abuse into something less than human.

46

Your reaction is identical to those nurses, prison officers, residential home carers and others who deny that the structure of their service and its power relations lead directly to abuse.

This denial and protest is maintained against a similar background of enquiries and findings which show these institutions to be flawed in exactly the way the the research predicts that they would.

The military is at least as bad at this and probably worse because of its own overt goals.

I will continue this debate when you prodeuce a single cite to back up your claim that:

“This is not the natural outcome of military training.”

One cite to show clearly that after military training, people were less likely or only as likely to engage in violence against ‘the other’ than before. Just one cite.

47

Gosh, Pjen, ever think that maybe all those people might be right and you might be wrong? Particularly since you seem to be having a hard time coming up with the enquiries, findings, and research which back your claim?

I’ll say it as often as I have to. It is logically impossible to prove a negative. The burden is on you to provide the studies which show a direct correlation between military training and this kind of violence. Not only have you failed to provide a proper study, some of your cites actually refute your claim that the problem is specific or even worse with the military.

In fact, now that I look at it, even you are backing off from that claim with your first paragraph in your last post. Here, let’s look at it again:

Wow, so I guess the military isn’t so special in that regard anymore, is it? It goes further:

Probably worse? So now you’re backpedalling further, especially since you didn’t even mention nurses, prison officers, etc. until you were called out on it.

Not a very convincing argument overall, Pjen. Sorry.

48

One cite please.

49

Sigh . . . My inner voice is telling me that this is a waste of time, but here goes.

I checked Academic Search Premier, PsychINFO, Medline, and Sociological Abstracts (Thank you, library school!). Surprisingly enough, there hasn’t been a lot of research done along these lines. I did, however, manage to pull up the following cite:

Title: Why Ordinary People Torture Enemy Prisoners
Source: Science Magazine, Nov 26, 2004.Vol. 306, Iss. 5701; pg. 1482.

Let’s take a look. First, from the abstract:

More or less what I and others have been saying all along. Moving on:

(Bolding mine)

So here we go, Pjen. I say that anyone can screw up like that given the right circumstances. I say that lack of training was the cause of the screwup here, and m relevant article from a peer reviewed journal agrees with me.

And . . .

Again, what I’ve been saying all along. One thing you might not find in this article is how military training itself caused Abu Ghraib. That’s because the authors don’t seem to think it did.

OK, there’s my one cite. But ya’ know something? I just knew something I was reading sounded pertinent to this discussion, so I looked through Time, and voila, I found **Why Did They Do It? ** in the 5/17/2004 issue. It reiterates the lack of training and stress of war reasons, but what I was looking for was the quote by Zimbardo regarding the college experiment:

(Bolding mine)

So there you have it. Zimbardo cites lack of training and lack of accountability as the causes for the abuse in the very study you quoted to prove your point!!

And just for the hell of it, I looked up a guy you should know, seeing as how big an expert you are in social psychology and training for atrocity, Stanley Milgram.

OK, Pjen, there you go. You don’t need to be trained as a soldier to commit abuses. Abu Ghraib could happen to anyone. The abuses were in spite of the military training, not because of it.

Frankly, I don’t know why I bothered. As I’ve said the burden of proof lies on you, it’s impossible to prove a negative, and in any case, not much research has been done with regards to the military. I might add that you seem to know nothing about military discipline or military philosophy, and you have consistently demonstrated your abysmal ignorance of military training in this thread as I’ve pointed out above. Then again, my research skills needed work, and who knows? Maybe you really do have a point.

Two relevant cites (We won’t count the Time article). Shall we continue the debate?

50

I feel this is a waste of time. I do not believe that you are willing to argue the point and you are floundering because of your determination that Miltary Training and Experience MUST not be seen to be anything to do with Abu Ghraib and street beatings.

You also seem to be saying that I initially said that ONLY military training did this sort of damage to people. I started off citing miltary training and experience as a cause of such outrages as this was the subject under =discussion. I later discussed this by citing similar occurrences in any group where power relationships with an ‘other’ are liable to abuse. I pointed out that military training and experience is similar except in so far as it has ‘killing and maiming’ as part of its overt goal. I pointed out that this tends to make military training and experience even more dangerous.

I pass now to your cites.

My abstract of the Science article from:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/5701/1482

says:

Accounts of prisoner abuse and other institutional violence often blame a few isolated individuals, but social psychology emphasizes social contexts, which can make almost anyone oppress, conform, and obey in abetting destructive social behavior. In this Policy Forum, meta-analyses demonstrate the quantitative reliability and import of social contexts. Moreover, recent data show that initial reactions to low-status, oppositional outgroups may involve disgust and contempt, consistent with abuse. Together, social pressures and social prejudices help explain the recent abuse scandals.

Would you provide your full abstract with source please.

The above quote fully supports my contention in that it says specifically “social psychology emphasizes social contexts, which can make almost anyone oppress, conform, and obey in abetting destructive social behavior”. The social context on which I rely is that provided by military training and experience.

I note that this is a Policy Forum paper and not a piece of research.

I further looked to the critiques which followed which can be found on:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;307/5717/1873b

A selection:

“…(they) suggest that almost anyone could have committed the Abu Ghraib atrocities (1). They go on to say, “lay-observers may believe that explaining evil amounts to excusing it and absolving people of responsibility for their actions…” Any humane person should react to their “explanation” in exactly this way. I think they make the mistake of trying to divorce “science” from politics in an area where the two are inextricably mixed. There is no mention in their Policy Forum of the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice advised the White House that torture “may be justified” (2-4); that the “war on terrorism” renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions (2-4); or that torture was endorsed at the very highest levels of the government and military (5). Is it really irrelevant that General Miller is quoted (6) as saying that prisoners are “like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them”? Why was none of this mentioned?”

"Instead, Milgram suggested that the true explanation of evil like the Holocaust was linked to his experiments by their demonstration of “a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.” [(1), p. 145].

Authority figures of governments headed by George Bush and Tony Blair define what is happening, in Iraq and across the world, as a “war on terror” involving certain nations and peoples who pose an immediate threat to us because they are mad and/or evil and bent on our total annihilation. The public and the army may accept the official definition of our predicament unquestioningly, which in turn naturally legitimizes extreme force to be used against our “enemy.”

If U.S. psychologists and scientists are going to stray outside of the narrow confines of the laboratory and attempt to explain the appalling behavior of its citizens abroad, science is ill-served by accepting unflinchingly the definitions of “situation” and “enemy” provided by politicians."

"However, the skeptical reactions to the Policy Forum mirror it in failing to ask a more fundamental question, which concerns the politics of science: Why is it that American social scientists become galvanized to explain evil as something that can be committed by “anyone,” given a particular “context,” only when Americans commit the atrocities?

The point here is that the might (or spin) of American social science has seldom been invoked to semi-excuse (in the popular mind) others’ atrocities. “They,” these others, are simply genetically and historically assumed to be evil or savage.

There is a shadow over Fiske et al.'s paper: The rest of the world may well think that American social science works for the U.S. State Department."

You go on to quote:

“Virtually anyone can be aggressive if sufficiently provoked, stressed, disgruntled, or hot (3-6). The situation of the 800th Military Police Brigade guarding Abu Ghraib prisoners fit all the social conditions known to cause aggression. The soldiers were certainly provoked and stressed: at war, in constant danger, taunted and harassed by some of the very citizens they were sent to save, and their comrades were dying daily and unpredictably. Their morale suffered, they were untrained for the job, their command climate was lax, their return home was a year overdue, their identity as disciplined soldiers was gone, and their own amenities were scant (7). Heat and discomfort also doubtless contributed.”

Because all of this is predictable in battlefield operations it should be incumbent on military training to ensure that such evils do not occur. Knowledge of the special conditions applicable to military training and experience should be applied to ensuring that mindsets of retribution and clannish retribution should be opposed rather than allowed or encouraged as it is to build up unit morale.

I do agree that any group of people could act in this way given suitable conditions. It is just that the conditions that follow from military training and experience are particularly likely to permit this to occur.

It should also be noted that your suggestion that it was “lack of training” that led to Abu Ghraib is very true, and the lack of training is just as much the responsibility of the Military as the training that it actually gives.

This is also relevant to your quote re Zimbardo. And also your comments about Milgram.

The Time magazine article I will discount as not research but merely comment.

So, I still await some peer reviewed research that shows that Military Training leads to group actions that are more reasoned and moral than group actions of non-military trained persons.

In summary:

ANY group of people is likely to behave abominably when the social context allows.

The social context of military training- unit allegiance, command structures, shared belief systems and meta communications (torture is OK, the GC is crap etc) together with the almost uniques social structure (which necessarily allows killing and maiming as part of the package) means that military training and experience is particularly likely to cause people to bahave abominably because of that social context.